Root
a short story in FlashBack Fiction
Twelve midwives have come already. Have bustled through the sharp wind with their bundles of charms and bitter herbs. Have sighed and prayed and despaired. Frau Mueller now, her cold hands on Ilsa’s belly, prays to the Virgin, the Virgin’s mother, and all the Holy Mothers. Calls on them to ease the infant out, to end the heaving pains of five long days… Read more or read an interview about the inspiration for this story
The Light of Day
a short story in The Honest Ulsterman, reprinted at Seren Books
It keeps startling Evelyn – the fact that she’s really here. For a second, she’ll forget where she is, but then she’ll catch something sweet and bitter in the air, or notice the brilliance in the light, and remember that she’s abroad… Read more
Expecting
a short story in The Lampeter Review
It was in May, when the baby was exactly one week past her due date, that it occurred to me she might never come at all. I never knew, until I got pregnant that pregnancy officially lasts forty weeks and not nine months as I’d always thought. And that they start the counting two weeks before you even became pregnant, as if time rolls backwards because a life is going to begin… Read more
In My Mother’s Garden
an essay in Literary Mama
It has been a year since she died. It’s the strangest thing to have become a mother just as I lost my own mother; only the tiniest sliver of time where I was both mother and mothered… Read more
Good Enough to Eat
a short essay in Mom Egg Review
We talked a lot about eating you in those early days. You were made of apricots and berries and soft new bread and cotton candy, your tiny nose like a chickpea. How could we not want to consume you?… Read more
Becky Tipper 